Religious and Political Activities
Hargreaves later worked as a DJ before moving to the Isle of Man as a tax exile. While living there, he decided to devote his life to Christianity. He became a Pentecostal minister and obtained a Post-graduate Diploma in Theology and a Master’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Oxford.
At the 1997 general election, Hargreaves stood as the Referendum Party candidate for Walthamstow. In 2002, he was a founder member of the Christian Peoples Alliance (CPA) and served as Acting Chair of its Hackney branch.
In 2004, Hargreaves was a founder of the East London Christian Choir School in Hackney, an independent school which used the Accelerated Christian Education programme. In the same year, he founded Operation Christian Vote as an alternative to the CPA. The party stood in every British region at the European election, 2004, focussing its campaign on opposition to abortion.
Hargreaves then stood for the party at the Birmingham Hodge Hill by-election, 2004, where he took only 90 votes. He fared better at the 2005 general election in Na h-Eileanan an Iar, where he took 7.6% of the votes cast and beat the Conservative Party candidate. Hargreaves was also involved with Christian Voice.
In 2006, Hargreaves formed the Scottish Christian Party, for which he stood in the Dunfermline and West Fife by-election, 2006, taking 1.2% of the vote.
The Scottish Christian Party regards homosexuality as a sin and campaigns against gay activism. Hargreaves personally funded the Employment Tribunals of nine firefighters who were suspended after refusing to distribute leaflets at a gay pride march. He was involved in protests against Jerry Springer: The Opera, claiming that "Jerry Springer proved the greatest rallying point for Christian activism in the past 10 years". The party had many other policies, including a proposal that Scottish criminals should be placed in jails in developing countries.
The Scottish Christian Party put up candidates in every region in the Scottish Parliament election, 2007. Hargreaves' movement was regarded by the rival Christian People's Alliance as a Pentecostal movement. At the election, he headed the party's list in the Glasgow electoral region, aiming in particular to unseat openly bisexual Scottish Green Party Member of the Scottish Parliament Patrick Harvie. Harvie had recently asked the police to investigate allegedly homophobic comments by the Archbishop of Glasgow and was described by Hargreaves as a "gay fundamentalist".
Hargreaves also founded the Welsh Christian Party to contest the Welsh Assembly election, 2007, at which he campaigned to remove the dragon symbol from the Welsh flag, claiming that it was "nothing less than the sign of Satan".
Hargreaves stood for the Christian Party at the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, 2008, where he asked the Haltemprice and Howden electorate to use their vote to demand a referendum on the European Union, which he believes is the greatest threat to our civil liberties". He received 76 votes, coming 16th out of 26 candidates.
In August 2008, Hargreaves fronted the Channel 4 programme Make Me a Christian. He has been strongly criticised by many, including the magazine New Humanist, Charlie Brooker and Lucy Bannerman of the Herald.
He had planned to stand in the Western Isles in the 2010 general election, but withdrew his candidacy in February 2010 after his wife's cancer returned.
However, he stood as a candidate for Barking in the 2010 General Election and even shared a debate with Nick Griffin on Genesis TV.
Read more about this topic: George Hargreaves (politician)
Famous quotes containing the words religious, political and/or activities:
“The best conversation is rare. Society seems to have agreed to treat fictions as realities, and realities as fictions; and the simple lover of truth, especially if on very high grounds, as a religious or intellectual seeker, finds himself a stranger and alien.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.”
—Milton Friedman (b. 1912)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)